Life on the Page: Poetry by Swarthmore College Students
Towards the end of his virtual reading at Swarthmore College last month, poet, educator, and Pulitzer Prize winner Jericho Brown told his audience, “I try to make my poems like living beings.” I wrote this statement down — actually just the phrase “living beings” — in my frantic attempt to record even a fraction of the wisdom that Brown offered to his starstruck listeners that night. By the end of the hour, my scratch paper was scrawled with mostly illegible bits and pieces of what had been said, yet the words “living beings” still stood out to me.
I began to notice the way that poems, especially the work of fellow writers that I encountered in campus publications, took on and sustained a life of their own. The pieces below, written by current students at the college, vary in subject matter and tone, ranging from an incisive look at unfiltered emotion to a poignant reflection on strained friendship to an unapologetic bid for political liberation. But one thing that all of this poetry has in common is its vitality, the way it breathes and moves. With their evocative word choices and striking personal voices, these authors imbue their poems with a spark, a liveliness that lifts them off of the page.
Madelon Basil is a junior at Swarthmore College majoring in English. She is interning at the Swarthmorean this spring with funding from the college’s Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility.
truth
tell it like it is
internal clogging
the smiles, tears, and even fears
will take you places
the times you laughed when you weren’t supposed to
think, a tap faucet
a hand moves to turn it off,
resistance, is keen
doubled over
like a breath, don’t stop
the bathroom counter is yours
if you only search
looking
the mirror tells you
that the reflection is real
pointed, rigid, real
hysterically
when it blows, at last
rapidly, fluid, it shouts
intent, to tell it
as it is
Destiny Samuel ‘22
Destiny Samuel is a junior from Philadelphia. She is majoring in Black Studies with a focus on language and literacy.
manifesto for liberation
we stand for burning shit down and recalling those great masses that no longer serve
us like shame, like shackles,
like all the childless gardens with the brown grass and the brown kids and the black kids
and the weekend days in a never-ending numbness we stand on stolen breath
we stand on train platforms and on top of parked buses no one is leaving
this city, there will be nothing to leave
there will be small things
to hold in a heartbeat or a backpack
we stand for clean air and kicking canisters back yelling i can’t breathe while sick of
everyone else spitting droplets of fire into the blind spots of officers we stand for the right to
stand hands up
we stand for life and pounding fists
we stand our holy ground and we’ll be damned if the grass dies under our feet
we live in the dawn—
we teach life, sir.
no more mourning.
freedom of speech is no longer
the freedom to say nothing at all
we stand for everything and we
do not fall
we don’t have to time to fall
we’re busy, we’re ablaze,
we’re hellish good and amazing
we stand for us all, long shadows and bloody knuckles let us spill sun rays onto our new page
we stand for paper shredded high rise rage we stand for the new age
we stand and
do not fall.
Raya Tuffaha ‘23
Raya Tuffaha is a Palestinian-American from Seattle. She is a sophomore studying theater.
Friendship Is a Sieve
The time between us stretched like cotton candy.
The hollowness of home seeped
into every spear of asparagus I eat. I want
to go back. I want to flush away what air is left as a memory,
as a whisper across the distance of a country.
To return is to flood the window behind the worst of it all. Overflow the kitchen,
drown the silverware, whirlpool the angel food cake in the oven.
How long must it take for us to puzzle-piece back into ourselves? Rearrange, snap into
a portrait of who we tell ourselves we were.
Wonder, wonder why we’ve never seen
the cherry blossoms open wide. Wonder, wonder
why nothing ever amounts to anything.
Tiffany Wong-Jones ‘23
Tiffany Wong-Jones is from the Pacific Northwest. She is a sophomore studying English literature and education.
